WASHINGTON — The U.S. Postal Service, which has been losing customers for almost a decade, is still struggling to right itself.
Everyone understands its basic problem. The electronic age has pushed first-class mail into an unstoppable decline. To stay afloat, the Postal Service needs to get its costs under control by tactics such as closing post offices, eliminating Saturday delivery and downsizing its workforce. To boost revenue, it could offer banking services and sell stuff besides stamps.
But with three Congresses in a row failing to pass legislation to help stabilize its finances, some lawmakers and policy experts have reached the consensus that it’s time for the government to sell the post office.
For a few years, that group was limited to conservatives and Republicans in Congress. But now a Democrat at the centrist Brookings Institution, Washington’s premier academic think tank, is joining the privatization side, arguing in a new paper that Congress’ inaction requires that something be done. Elaine Kamarck says that letting politicians continue to protect the Postal Service from competition is no longer viable.
“If the USPS were a purely private entity, the changing shape of the marketplace wouldn’t necessarily pose an existential threat,” Kamarck wrote in an essay made public last week, “Delaying the inevitable: Political stalemate and the U.S. Postal Service.”
“They could shrink the infrastructure created to deliver first-class mail and increase their capacity to deliver parcels,” she writes, “a logical adaptation to the changes that have come about as Americans have moved from paper to the Internet.”
The idea of selling off any part of the government agency for which Benjamin Franklin first served as postmaster general has drawn fierce opposition from Democrats in Congress and the still-powerful postal unions.
But Kamarck argues that the Postal Service’s existence in a “never-never land” that is “not fully public and not fully private,” stifled by laws and saddled with a “governance structure that impedes innovation,” now requires that the country’s second-largest civilian employer after Wal-Mart be broken in two.
Many of the problems getting in the way for the post office stem from Congress. The Postal Service has been self-financed for decades, but Congress controls most of what it does.
Congress, riven by an ideological and demographic divide between lawmakers representing rural and urban districts, cannot agree on a fix to its finances, made shakier by massive liabilities for future retirees. Proposals on Capitol Hill would let postal officials compete with other retailers and make cuts to service. But interests including postal unions and greeting-card companies have stepped in to pressure lawmakers not to act. And the losses continue — $5 billion last year, the eighth annual net loss in a row.
The government entity would continue delivering the mail. The rest of the agency would spin off into something private, competing with the likes of banks, retailers, FedEx and United Parcel Service to deliver packages and sell anything else it wanted to. The change would open the door to a sale to the highest bidder.
Postal officials rejected the proposal. In a statement, Toni DeLancey, the Postal Service’s senior manager for public relations, said, “The idea of separating and privatizing the package delivery business, which has been growing by double digits for the past several years, is poorly conceived at best.
“At worst, and aside from being politically and economically unrealistic, the proposal aims to shift an enormous financial burden onto taxpayers, which is unnecessary and unwanted in any policy context.”
